Longest Years

Upcoming hair appointments have a way of sending me back through old pictures.

Somewhere in my photographs was a length I wanted to try again. There were hundreds from my late twenties onwards. I opened a few, checking how my hair fell around my face. I remembered the dinners and holidays, though sometimes I checked the date to place them.

Then I reached a handful from university. One brought back the afternoon around it. I remembered finishing classes and going to the cinema together, then getting dinner afterwards. We ended the night sitting along the seawall, still talking. I started remembering places I had not seen in years and people I had almost forgotten.

I went back to the more recent pictures. There were trips I had loved, people I still saw, homes I had spent years in. So much had happened since university. I had far more photographs of those later years, yet the handful from university kept bringing back days I had no photographs of at all.

Those years had not lasted any longer than the others.

Which years take up the most room when you remember your life?

The reminiscence bump is the tendency for memories to cluster around adolescence and early adulthood. In middle and older adulthood, people often remember a disproportionate share of experiences from roughly ages ten to thirty.

The age range varies with how researchers ask people to remember. Recalling important life events produces a different pattern from responding to individual words. What we remember depends partly on how we are asked.

Several explanations overlap. Adolescence and early adulthood often involve unfamiliar experiences, major changes and a developing sense of who we are. We may remember an event because it helps explain who we became.

Yet novelty alone does not settle the question. Researchers also examine cultural life scripts: shared expectations about what happens in a typical life and when. Many familiar milestones fall in young adulthood. These expectations may help us decide which experiences belong in our life story.

Remembering more from those years does not establish that they were happier or more valuable.

A first apartment can provide a setting, familiar faces and a clear beginning. Ten years in a comfortable home can require more thought to describe. Saying what happened is sometimes easier than explaining what gradually changed. Having more stories about those years can make them seem more important.

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In a 2011 paper, psychologists Annette Bohn and Dorthe Berntsen found a similar pattern in lives that had yet to happen. They asked children to write their future life stories. Many imagined events fell in young adulthood and followed familiar milestones, such as finishing school or getting married.

In a second study, children imagined future events in response to individual words. Their answers followed those milestones less closely, and the young-adulthood bump disappeared. Being asked to tell a life story seemed to draw on shared ideas about what happens when.

The findings suggest that these expectations may help organise both our memories and our imagined futures.

We may enter adulthood already expecting certain years to hold most of the important events.

There are familiar ways to describe leaving school, starting work or getting married. Later changes can be harder to name. Becoming less afraid of disagreement has no ceremony. A friendship that changes daily life may have no clear beginning.

Such experiences can matter deeply without fitting easily into the story we expected to tell.

At twenty-three, moving cities can sound like the beginning of a life. At forty-three, the same decision can seem to require an explanation. We have built something by then. Other people expect us to stay with it. Sometimes we do too.

There may be good reasons to stay. Moving costs money. People depend on us. But “I cannot do this now” is a different conclusion from “that part of my life is over.” It is worth knowing which one we mean.

We can mistake the years we remember most for the years when we were most alive.

If everything that made us who we are seems to have happened early, we may expect the years ahead to change us less. We begin to call a desire unrealistic partly because it arrived later than expected.

I think about how quickly I scrolled past the more recent photographs. There was a lot of life in them, even when the stories did not come as readily.

Remembering more from one part of a life does not tell us how much is left to happen.

What have you ruled out because you think you should have done it by now?

^{This is a space for exploration and reflection, not medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice. Each reader’s situation is unique and deserves the right kind of support. If you are struggling or in crisis, please contact a licensed mental health professional. This edition contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we may earn from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.}